ÓSCAR ABRAHAM PABÓN. Word and Work

The Fernando Pradilla Gallery presents the third exhibition by Venezuelan artist Óscar Abraham Pabón (San Juan de Colón, 1984).

The exhibition, titled Word and Work, focuses on the themes that underpin Pabón's artistic and theoretical research: the presumed hidden soul in materials and objects and its influence on the human psyche. This time, designer chairs occupy his mind. The Chair That Dreamed of Moore is the story of a psychoanalytic session between a psychiatrist and a Model 3107 chair, popularly known as the Series 7 chair by architect Arne Jacobsen. This play on reflection leads us to question how human beings lost consciousness in a process of objectification and how objects came to have consciousness.

Investigating the psychological reception of objects is a constant in Pabón's work. In 2023, she completed the project Psychoarchitecture for the Mies Foundation in Barcelona. With an approach close to the psychoanalysis of form, the installation consisted of a large impacted brick wall with shapes inspired by the ink blots of Rorschach tests, which prompted us to reflect on the influence of architectural form in shaping the human psyche.

This same approach is developed in recent series of canvases such as Psych, in which rugs and their patterns, provided with traditional lines and colours, form pieces that captivate the viewer in an almost hypnotic manner, appealing to their ancestral memories.

The exhibition, Word and Work, showcases other pieces crafted from chairs designed by architects. The piece My Hands Are Your Backrest analyses how the backrests and armrests of chairs were symbols of power and reflects on seating objects from a symbolic and affective perspective. The title, Word and Work, refers to the speaking quality of objects and to form understood through its symbolic power, in which every small decision made regarding its design is conscious and intentional. Every form holds a narrative constructed from history and memory; each civilization projects a symbolic charge onto the objects it produces, in which it identifies itself.

Architecture, form, colour, sculpture, memory, and psychology are, therefore, the foundations on which the work of Óscar Abraham Pabón is based. Pabón is an artist who began participating very early in biennials and public projects in Latin America and Europe and whose work is represented in some of the most outstanding collections in Latin America, such as the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros CIFO Collection, the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection in New York, the C&FE Collection in Caracas, and the Steinvorth House in San Cristóbal, Venezuela.